Congratulations to Jessica Eaton for being awarded a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship

Jessica Eaton’s photographs take the medium of photography itself as their central subject, investigating the components of the photographic process—light, color, time, and the capacities of lenses, shutters, film stock, filters, emulsions, etc.—as tools for modelling and challenging human perception. Using inventive and technically exacting analog methods, Eaton produces alternate visions of reality, capturing images that the naked eye could never perceive. In dialog with the history of modernist abstraction and scientific photography as well as the contemporary prevalence of digital images and effects (which Eaton mimics through in-camera techniques), her work explores the limits of vision as well as its speculative frontiers.

Eaton’s work has been widely exhibited internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at the MOCA Cleveland/Transformer Station, OH, and Oakville Galleries, ON (both 2015), as well as at The Photographers Gallery/The Hospital Club, London (2014). Eaton’s work was also included in the Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2017), Under Construction: New Positions in American Photography at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam (2014), and the Quebec Triennial, Montreal (2011). Her work is held in many significant museum collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, and The Art Gallery of Ontario. She was a recipient of the Hyères Photography Jury Grand Prize in 2012, the Talents 2011 award from Foam International Photography Magazine and was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2016 and the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize in 2013.

With the assistance of the Guggenheim, Eaton will build upon her research into the photographic recording of information (especially the creation and reproduction of color) in order to focus on the photographic object—the physical print. Over the next year, the fellowship will support Eaton’s investigation into the possibilities of what a photographic print can be. Departing from the now-ubiquitous ink print, Eaton’s new body of work—tentatively titled Pure Pigment and Precious Metals—may involve colour carbon prints, silvers, platinum, dye transfer, and perhaps even daguerreotypes or holograms.

Jessica Eaton’s work has been supported by grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. She was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, and studied at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver. She lives in Montreal.

Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation has granted more than $360 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are scores of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, poets laureate, members of the various national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Turing Award, National Book Award, and other significant, internationally recognized honors.

The Guggenheim Fellowship program remains a significant source of support for artists, writers, and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and scientific researchers. New and continuing donations from friends, Trustees, former Fellows, and other foundations have ensured that the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation will be able to continue to carry out its historic mission.

For more information on the Fellows and their projects, please visit the Foundation’s website.